He leaned against the balcony railing, and hung his head over the drop: four stories to the next step of the pyramid, then another four stories, and so on down. Windows glowed from the sandstone blocks: other bars, or people late at work, lost in paper mazes.
“She should apologize to me,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t true. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” That, also, sounded like a lie. The air up here, fresh and cool and open, would not admit falsehood. He drank. “What would I say to her, anyway?”
“Say you’re sorry for being an idiot, to start. Maybe you add: I was under a lot of stress. We’d just saved the city from a mad necromancer, and I have issues with religion, but those don’t give me the right to pass judgment on you. You could plea the fact that your father’s a lunatic, which makes you sensitive about the subject.”
His next sip of gin lingered too long in his mouth, and when he swallowed he shivered as it slithered into him. “Yeah.” Turning from the world he leaned back against the railing and followed Teo’s gaze to the altar in the center of the roof. “Apologize,” he said, testing the idea. “Even if I’m right.”
“Do you want to be right, or do you want to be with her?”
“Can’t it be both?”
“Later, maybe. From her point of view, you’ve insulted her, insulted her dead parents, and left her in the Drakspine Mountains with no one to keep her company but a bunch of the same Wardens who killed her family. This is throw-yourself-at-her-feet-and-beg-forgiveness time.”
“I do sound like a jerk when you put it that way.”
“Yes.”
They watched the stone.
“Hey,” he said at last.
“Yes?”
“You’ve been a real friend to me about this, for the last few months.”
She shrugged, and sipped her single malt.
“I’m glad it’s working out, with you and Sam.”
“Is it? I mean.” She examined the constellations reflected in her whiskey, in the ice. “She’s wonderful. Wild. Too wild for me, I think. She went out in the riots, when you were gone. I couldn’t get her to stay. She said she had to be where the people were fighting.”
“Artists.”
She didn’t reply.
“Do you love her?”
“I think. I don’t know. Shit. Maybe I’m just giving you all this advice because I’m desperate, and I can help you, even if I can’t help myself.”
“To desperation,” he said, and raised his glass. She raised hers as well, toward the altar.
“And to bleeding hearts,” she added, and they drank.
31
An apology was easier to conceive than to compose. He tried writing the words he would say. He tried all the sales tactics—delivering his speech to a mirror, to an empty room, to a picture of her drawn with charcoal and tacked to his wall. Nothing worked.
At the office, instead of processing claims or helping prepare for the eclipse, he began and abandoned countless variations on an apologetic theme. Drafts formed a crumpled mountain in his wastebasket. In the end he settled on a paragraph cribbed from a classic play. “The problems of two people don’t amount to much in this crazy world,” it began. He felt foolish reciting another man’s words, but he couldn’t think of anything better.
Once he abandoned his search for the perfect words, he realized he didn’t know where to deliver the imperfect ones. Mal had never brought him to her home. He could find her office without trouble, but the conversation he wanted to have with her was not fit for a place of business, and dangerous besides. Walls could hear, and Red King Consolidated was not a religion-tolerant workplace as such. Finding her home address from payroll would attract too much attention.
Better to meet her on neutral ground, he thought, and returned to the border between Stonewood and the Skittersill. Seeking runners, he found an indigent circle of them sharing a pipe with Balam in a shattered statuary court. The tattooed trainer sported a new scar over his brow, and his right arm hung in a sling. Caleb did not ask what he had done in the riots. Balam took the pipe from a girl to his left, breathed in deep, held smoke in his lungs, and exhaled; as a dragon it rose, circling through ruined statues. Balam’s eyes fixed on a point beyond the sky. “Haven’t learned enough to let her alone.”
“I owe her something. I want to pay her back.”
Balam examined Caleb, passed the pipe, set his free hand on top of his cast. “Maybe you do. Been weeks since she last ran with us. She’s keeping herself to herself. You’ll find her when she wants to be found.”
The runners did not offer Caleb their pipe, and he left alone. No wonder they were suspicious. Their circle was reduced. Many must have died at North Station, or been wounded in the riots.
He set those thoughts aside.
Mal was back in the city—a team of technicians had relieved her at Seven Leaf a week before—but where?
How much did he know about her, really? A few chance encounters. Chemistry. They had saved each other’s lives. They were both wounded. Was that enough to build on?
The public address books were useless: eighty M. Kekapanias to choose from, assuming she was listed at all. With his other options exhausted, he bought a box of pastries at Muerte Coffee and went upstairs to beg Anne, the King in Red’s secretary, for help.
She drank the coffee and ate two bear claws, and when Caleb told her a bowdlerized version of his fight with Mal, she clicked her tongue and smiled. Conversation turned to mystery plays and sports—Anne was an ullamal fanatic—and when Caleb left the Red King’s foyer, he had the address. A calculated risk: if Anne believed his story of a lover’s quarrel, she would protect his privacy. Not that he was lying. This was a quarrel, even if he and Mal were not precisely lovers.
Apology written, address in hand, he should have gone to her at once, but for three days he did not.
He walked at night. Aimless steps wound him to Skittersill. He kept to the light, walked well-traveled streets, and soon reached a patch of red earth between two brick buildings, bare of rubble, weeds, or insects. Twenty years ago, Temoc’s temple stood on this barren plot.
Caleb remembered waiting in the pews, aged seven or eight, knees drawn to his chin, as Temoc stretched out his arms and chanted the story of the Hero Twins to solemn men with faces made from wood and stone. He made mock sacrifice, brought his knife down handle-first on the chest of a prostrate disciple. Half-formed godlings crawled from the altar and licked the living sacrifice’s skin for drops of unshed blood.
The Wardens burned Temoc’s temple after the Skittersill Rising. They draped it in a silver net with lines as fine as dream, and the net burned down through brick and metal, plaster and rock and concrete. In thirty minutes the temple fell. The silver net sunk into the earth, leaving a crosshatched scar on bare red dust. Nothing grew there to this day.
Caleb threw a pebble into the empty lot. Green light flashed where the pebble landed. When Caleb’s vision cleared, a fine white dust lay against the red.
Mal lived in a skyspire on the west side. Caleb took the airbus over, transferring three times. Most of the people who lived in Mal’s spire, in any spire for that matter, flew on their own rather than take the bus.
Leather-winged drakes roosted in an iron aerie beneath the skyspire. Their wings twitched as the airbus approached, and they followed the passenger gondola with hungry yellow eyes. Caleb was the only one to dismount at the stop. He staggered along the catwalk, hands clasped to guardrails, not looking down. The drakes watched him.
The catwalk ended at the skyspire’s crystal wall, without any sign of a door or entrance. He waited outside at first. The sun set over the Pax and the roosting lizards roared their dusk roars. Night fell, and he felt ridiculous standing on the doorstep with flowers tucked under his arm.